Architecture.

A Bright Idea

Plan To Illuminate Downtown Buildings Reflects Well On The Mayor

January 18, 1998|By Blair Kamin, Tribune Architecture Critic.

Here's a way to experience all the visual drama a city can provide: Wait until nightfall and watch the lights. Not just any lights, but the ones that turn skyscrapers into objects of rapturous beauty. What you'll see gives new meaning to the words "bright lights, big city."

There's the frilly white Wrigley Building, bathed in high-powered spotlights as it preens for the weathermen on the evening news. There's the gracefully stepped-back office building at 919 N. Michigan Ave. (originally the Palmolive Building), still a subtle knockout, but once even more spectacular with its Lindbergh Beacon knifing into the sky.

Darkness is a canvas on which lighting designers paint, and when they get it right the effect can be as drop-dead as the diagonal shafts of light that slice through the darkness on the canvases of the 17th Century Italian artist Caravaggio.

Done up in this divine effect, buildings become beacons. They flash a message about the center city: "It's not dark, gloomy, dangerous or deadly here. This is where the action is. Come have a little fun." Cue Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."

So it's good news that Richard M. Daley, the city-beautifying mayor who has a thing for tree-planting and wrought-iron fences, has commissioned a master plan for illuminating downtown Chicago.

As the Tribune's Gary Washburn reported, the new strategy calls for bathing nearly 100 high-rises in tasteful splashes of light. Also on the mayoral agenda: illuminating city bridges and bridge houses that serve as gateways to the Loop and replacing hundreds of nondescript 1960s-style street lights with graceful ornamental models with turn-of-the-century designs.

The plan is welcome because it will make downtown more welcoming, if not quite a duplicate of Paris, "the City of Light," which is where Daley got the idea on a 1996 sister-city trip. (And you thought those mayoral trips were just boondoggles.) A beautifully lit skyline would certainly show off the city to good advantage if Daley lands another national political convention in the year 2000.

On the other hand, figuratively speaking, I wish a few more light bulbs had gone on above the heads of the people who put together the plan. Mayoral aides are touting it as a "millennium project," but the plan has the same retro appeal of Daley's rebuilt bridges and other infrastructure improvements. In other words, it's safe aesthetically and, thus, safe politically.

Even so, you have to admire the effort put forth for the document, titled "Chicago Downtown Lighting Master Plan." It's thorough, it's thoughtful and it should yield crowd-pleasing results. How many other big cities in America are led by mayors who actually care about such arcane matters as nighttime building lighting? Surely you could count the number on one hand.

Prepared by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and architectural lighting experts Schuler & Shook, both of Chicago, the plan takes in the area roughly bounded by Wacker Drive on the north and west, Michigan Avenue on the east and Congress Parkway on the south.

It recommends four corridors -- Michigan Avenue, State Street, LaSalle Street and Wacker Drive bordering the Chicago River -- where illuminating buildings would have the greatest impact. Almost 100 high-rises are considered prime candidates for exterior lighting. Most of the buildings date back to the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to modern office buildings like Sears Tower, which glow from within at night, they have solid, masonry surfaces that provide just the right surface for exterior lighting.

No costs are computed to carry out the plan, but don't worry about dollars and cents right now. The plan stakes out a vision. Better yet, it's a "how-to," as well as a "please-don't," manual that any nuts-and-bolts building manager ought to be able to follow.

Here's one of my favorite suggestions, aimed at the Donald Trumps of the world: "The brightest is not the best. . . . No one building should be so bright so as to overpower its neighbors or seek to dominate the rest of the downtown skyline." (The Wrigley Building, the report goes on to explain, is an exception to this rule; its white terra-cotta facade was expressly designed to be brilliantly lit at night.)

You wish somebody would have taped that plea for modesty onto the drafting board of Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York architects whose 311 S. Wacker office building is topped by a 70-foot drum lit by nearly 2,000 fluorescent tubes. "A visual poke in the eye," the American Institute of Architects' Guide to Chicago rightly calls it.

Another good idea: Be judicious in the use of active light -- light that blinks, changes in color or projects into the sky. This advice is accompanied by a picture of the Chicago Theatre marquee, which suggests that "active light" is appropriate in the Randolph Street theater district, but in few other places.